he dry light
of experience. "They'll only send if there are others too."

"Of course then there'll be others--lots. The more the better for
Harold."

This young man's father was silent a little. "Perhaps--if they don't
play high."

"Ah," said his mother, "however Harold plays he has a way of winning."

"He has a way too of being a hopeless ass. What I meant was how he comes
there at all," Edward explained.

"Why as any one comes--by being invited. She wrote to him--weeks ago."

Brookenham just traceably took this in, but to what profit was not
calculable. "To Harold? Very good-natured." He had another short
reflexion, after which he continued: "If they don't send he'll be in for
five miles in a fly--and the man will see that he gets his money."

"They WILL send--after her note."

"Did it say so?"

Her melancholy eyes seemed, from afar, to run over the page. "I don't
remember--but it was so cordial."

Again he meditated. "That often doesn't prevent one's being let in for
ten shillings."

There was more gloom in this forecast than his wife had desired to
produce. "Well, my dear Edward, what do you want me to do? Whatever a
young man does, it seems to me, he's let in for ten shillings."

"Ah but he needn't be--that's my point. _I_ wasn't at his age."

Harold's mother took up her book again. "Perhaps you weren't the same
success! I mean at such places."

"Well, I didn't borrow money to make me one--as I've a sharp idea our
young scamp does."

Mrs. Brookenham hesitated. "From whom do you mean--the Jews?"

He looked at her as if her vagueness might be assumed. "No. They, I take
it, are not quite so cordial to him, since you call it so, as the old
ladies. He gets it from Mitchy."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Brookenham. "Are you very sure?" she then demanded.

He had got up and put his empty cup back on the tea-table, wandering
afterwards a little about the room and looking out, as his wife had done
half an hour before, at the dreary rain and the now duskier ugliness. He
reverted in this attitude, with a complete unconsciousness of making for
irritation, to an issue they might be supposed to have dropped. "He'll
have a lovely drive for his money!" His companion, however, said nothing
and he presently came round again. "No, I'm not absolutely sure--of his
having had it from Mitchy. If I were I should do something."

"What would you do?" She put it as if she couldn't possibly imagine.

"I'd speak to him."

"To Har